The Narcissism Was Already There

Everyone wants to know what happened to these people who support MAGA.

What radicalized them.

What broke their brains.

What turned your uncle into a person who posts conspiracy theories at 2 a.m. and screams at Thanksgiving dinner about immigrants.

The assumption is always that something happened to them.

That they were normal and then they weren’t.

That a movement came along, or a cable news channel, or an algorithm, and it changed who they were.

In 2021, researcher Joshua Hart at Union College published a study in the Journal of Social Psychology that tested this assumption directly. He didn’t study what people believe. He studied who they are. He and his coauthor, Nathaniel Stekler, gave 302 adults a battery of personality assessments measuring narcissism, right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and political attitudes. Then they mapped the relationships between those variables and support for Donald Trump.

The finding was not that Trump made people narcissistic.

The finding was that narcissistic people found Trump.

What I have been saying for months is correct.

Narcissism functioned as what Hart described as an upstream personality variable.

People who scored higher in narcissism were more likely to adopt right-wing authoritarian attitudes, which reflect a desire for obedience, conformity and hostility toward anyone who doesn’t belong.

They were also more likely to embrace social dominance orientation, the belief that some groups of people are simply better than other groups and deserve to be on top.

Both of those ideological positions then predicted support for Trump.

Narcissism also predicted anti-immigrant attitudes directly, which independently predicted Trump support.

What Hart mapped was a personality flowing downhill into politics.

The narcissism didn’t come from the politics.

The politics came from the narcissism.

This matters because it changes the question we should be asking. The question isn’t “how did MAGA radicalize these people?” The question is “what kind of person was already looking for a movement like MAGA?”

The Collective Version

Hart’s study examined individual narcissism. But in 2018, researcher Agnieszka Golec de Zavala at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Christopher Federico at the University of Minnesota published a study in Public Opinion Quarterly that examined a related but distinct phenomenon: collective narcissism.

Collective narcissism is the belief that your group, whether it’s your nation, your race, or your political movement, is exceptional and that the rest of the world doesn’t give it the recognition it deserves. Collective narcissists don’t just love their country. They resent anyone who doesn’t love their country as much as they do. They don’t feel pride. They feel entitlement. And they interpret any criticism, any challenge, any failure to worship the group as an act of aggression.

Federico and Golec de Zavala found that collective narcissism was a powerful predictor of voting for Trump in 2016, even after controlling for all the usual suspects:

* racial resentment

* hostile sexism

* personal economic dissatisfaction

* authoritarianism

* and standard party identification

People who scored highest on collective narcissism were 29% more likely to have voted for Trump than those who scored lowest.

“Make America Great Again” is not a policy position.

It is collective narcissism distilled into a slogan.

It says the group is special, the group has been disrespected, and the group’s greatness must be restored by punishing the people who refused to acknowledge it.

Golec de Zavala’s follow-up research, published in 2021 in Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy with coauthor Oliver Keenan, went further.

In three studies, including one conducted just before the 2020 election and another conducted right after the January 6 Capitol attack.

They found that collective narcissism predicted not only support for Trump’s reelection, but support for overriding democratic procedures to keep him in power.

It predicted support for the Capitol attack itself.

Collective narcissists didn’t just want their leader to win.

They wanted their leader to win by any means necessary, including violence, because the group’s supremacy mattered more than the system.

That isn’t radicalization.

That is a personality trait expressing itself through politics.

The Pathology is the Point

In 2021, researcher Matthew Yalch published a study in PLOS ONE examining pathological narcissism and intention to vote for Trump in the 2020 election.

Yalch used a hierarchical model of narcissism that breaks the trait into specific dimensions rather than treating it as a single score.

Two dimensions predicted Trump support above all others:

antagonism and indifference.

Antagonism is the tendency to exploit others, to demand admiration, and to react with rage when challenged.

Indifference is the inability to care about the experiences of other people.

Not a choice to not care. An inability to care.

A gap in the architecture of the personality where empathy is supposed to live.

“Trump’s presidency”, he wrote, “was run according to the very dimensions of narcissism that predicted support for him. Antagonism and indifference were guiding principles, both implicitly and explicitly.”

Trump didn’t change his supporters’ personalities.

He ran a political campaign that functioned as a personality test.

And the people who passed it, were the ones who already shared his pathology.</